Ed McBain - Like Love

“What did you do with the film, Mr. Barlow?”

“I burned it. I realized it had been a mistake, taking it like that, and I waited a long time before deciding to get rid of it. But… I wanted something of Tommy. Do you know? I wanted something to remind me of Tommy.” He shook his head. “I burned it two days before you came looking for it. I thought that was the end of it, when you came around that time. I thought the case would be closed.”

“Why’d you do it, Mr. Barlow?” Hawes asked. “Why’d you kill them?”

Barlow stared up at him for a moment, a slight man with a lopsided stance, a cane in his right hand. And for that moment,

Hawes felt an enormous sympathy for him; he looked at Barlow standing in the doorway of the house he had bought with his brother and tried to understand what had pushed this man into doing murder.

“Why’d you do it?” he asked again.

And Barlow, staring at Hawes, and through Hawes, and past him to a night long ago in April, said simply. “The idea just came to me,” and Hawes put the handcuffs onto his wrists.

* * * *

The idea just came to me. You have to understand that I didn’t go up there with the idea of killing them. I didn’t even know Irene Thayer existed,you understand, so I couldn’t have planned to killthem. You have to realizethat. Tommy told me thatmorning that he had a surprisefor me, and he gave me anaddress and toldme tocome there on my lunch hour. Igo to lunch every day attwelve -thirty. I could hardlywait to know what Tommy’s surprise was. I could hardlywait for lunch that day.

So at twelve-thirty I came down from my office and I took a cab uptown to the address he had given me. 1516 South Fifth Street. That was the address. Apartment IA. That’s where I went. I walked upstairs, and I rang the bell and Tommy opened the door with a big smile on his face, he was a happy-go-lucky person, you know, always laughing, and he asked me to come in, and then he took me into the living room, and the girl was there.

Irene.

Irene Thayer.

He looked at me and he said, “Irene, this is my brother, Amos,” and then with the smile still on his face he said to me, “Amos, this is Irene Thayer,” and I was reaching for her hand to shake hands with her when he said, “We’re getting married next month.”

I couldn’t believe him, do you know? I hadn’t even heard about this girl, and now he’d invited me to this strange apartment on South Fifth and he’d introduced her and told me he was going to marry her next month, and all without ever having even told me he was serious about anybody. I mean, I’m his brother. He could have at least told me.

They . . . they had two bottles of whisky there. Tommy said he had bought them to celebrate. He poured out some whisky, and we drank to the coming marriage, and all the while I was thinking why hadn’t he told me before this, why hadn’t he told his own brother? We’re… we were very close, you know. It was Tommy who took care of me after my mother and father died, he was like a father to me, I swear it, there was real love between us, real love. And while we drank, while I was all the time wondering why he hadn’t I told me about this Irene Thayer, they began to explain that Irene was married and that she would be leaving for Reno and that as soon as she got her divorce Tommy was going to join her there and they planned to spend their honeymoon out West, and then maybe Tommy would take a job out there, he wasn’t so sure, but he had heard there were a great many opportunities in California. He might, he said, try to get something in the picture business. He was always fooling around with film, you know, him and this fellow who worked at his place with him.

So we drank, and I began to realize that not only was he getting married to this strange girl I’d just met, but also he was planning on moving out, maybe living in California permanently, after we’d just bought a house for ourselves, well not just that minute, but we’d only been in the new house less than a year, and here he was talking of leaving it, of living in California, all the way on the other end of the country. I began to feel a little sick, and I excused myself and went into the bathroom, feeling nauseated, sick to my stomach, you know, and I looked in the medicine cabinet to see if there was some Alka-Seltzer or something, anything to quiet my stomach, and that was when I saw the sleeping pills, and I guess that was when I got the idea.

I guess so, anyway. I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t think I knew then that I was going to turn on the gas or anything, but I did know I was going to put the pills in their drinks, maybe I thought they’d die that way, do you know what I mean, from an overdose of sleeping pills. When I came out, I had the bottle of pills in my pocket. There were four pills in the bottle. Tommy poured fresh drinks, and I went into the kitchen with them, to put water in them, you know, we were drinking Scotch and water, and that was when I put the pills into their glasses, two pills in each glass, I figured that would be enough to put them to sleep, or maybe to kill them, I don’t know what I figured. The pills worked very fast. I was glad they did because my lunch hour was almost over, and I’ve never been late in all the time I’ve worked for Anderson and Loeb, never late getting to work in the morning, and not coming back from lunch, either. They were both asleep in maybe fifteen minutes, and I looked at them, and I realized they weren’t dead, only asleep, and I guess, yes, that must have been when, yes, I guess that was when I decided that I would have to kill them because, I don’t know, because I didn’t want Tommy to marry this girl and go to live all the way in California, yes, I suppose that was when I decided to turn on the gas.

I carried them into the bedroom and put them on the bed and then I saw the typewriter on the stand alongside the bed, and I typed up the note on the machine and put it on the dresser. I don’t know why I misspelled the word “ourselves.” I think it was just a mistake I made, because I don’t know how to type, I just pocked the note out with two fingers, but there wasn’t any eraser in the room, and besides I thought the mistake made the note look more genuine, so I left it there. I took off Tommy’s watch to hold the note down on the dresser, and that was when I got the idea of taking off their clothes. I guess I wanted to make it look as if this had been a love nest, do you know, as if they had just done it, do you know? I mean, before they turned on the gas. So I took off all their clothes, and folded them on the chairs, I tried to make it look the way I thought it would look if they had really taken off their own clothes before doing it, Then I went around the apartment and wiped everything I could remember touching, but I couldn’t remember what I’d touched and what I hadn’t, so I just wiped everything, with my handkerchief. I found the film in the living room while I was wiping the things off in there. It had Tommy’s name on the can, and I remember meeting his friend one time, and I remembered they’d made some movies together, so I put the reel in my coat pocket

Then I took the whisky bottles into the bedroom, and I opened the second one to make it look as if they’d been drinking a lot, and I spilled it out on the rug to make it look as if they’d got real drunk before turning on the gas, but I still hadn’t turned it on, even though the idea was in my head all the time, I knew I was going to do it, but I still hadn’t turned it on yet. While I was in the bedroom with the whisky bottles, I looked at the two of them on the bed, and it began bothering me, the two of them on the bed the way they were. I kept thinking about them all the while I was in the kitchen washing out the glasses. I washed and dried all three glasses, and I left two of them in the sink to make it look as if they’d been drinking alone together, and I put the third glass back in the cabinet where all the other glasses were. I thought I’d wiped them all clean. But I guess your lab has ways of finding out, it was silly of me to think they wouldn’t find out, with their microscopes and all. But all the while I was washing the glasses, I kept thinking of them on the bed there, and it kept bothering me that they would be found undressed even though I wanted it to look like love. So I went back into the bedroom, and I put their underwear back on, Tommy’s and the girl’s. I would have put on her . . . her brassiere, but … I … I didn’t know how. So I . . .I did what I could. Then I stood in the doorway and looked into the room for a minute to see if it still looked like love, and I decided that it did, and that was when I went into the kitchen and turned on the gas, and left the apartment.